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Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)

blog.wolfram.com

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Re: Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)

#271

Post by jetsetgo »

kylehotchkiss wrote: post #252
rg111 wrote: post #183

Let me tell you how tens of thousands, and eventually hundreds of thousands of students totally skipped Wolfram products and proprietary science products in general. Wolfram products are very highly priced, even much more so for the Indian market. Indian science and engineering colleges are usually very poorly funded save some IITs and premier provincial universities. There is no way in hell these colleges could ever…

This article isn’t about the pricing of wolfram software. The price they charge is what it costs to develop, host, and support the software, plus innovate on it. They can’t lower their prices substantially for individual markets. Best to just petition universities harder to arrange this software as software these days is as fundamental to education as the buildings we learn in.

price of your software should be in tune with the purchasing power of the country you're selling in. every software company does it; even Steam does it with games; it's a proven model

Re: Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)

#272

Post by bsder »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #262
bsder wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually disagree and think Altium will, in fact, be Victim #001 of KiCad. The question becomes: "Is Altium thousand dollars better than KiCad?" And a lot of the time the answer will now be "No." I already split my designs about 50/50 between Altium and KiCad--and that's before KiCad 6.0 which is imminent (6.0RC2 exists right now ). 1) KiCad has one killer feature: it's cross platform. I would argue that this will,…

Not having linux support is a big self-own for Altium. Its main high-end competitor, Cadence OrCAD/Allegro, has top-tier Linux support. Altium tried to do a "365" thing like Microsoft, and I doubt that's really what Altium users want. Altium was about to be a good high-end piece of software until they did this. Now it's homeless and it will lose to KiCAD for low-end things and Cadence for high-end.

To me, the self-own was trying to lock libraries behind subscription.

Altium had just gotten to the point that everybody providing chips was also providing an Altium library footprint and symbol.

It was really nice--for about 12-18 months.

And then I started getting Altium libraries that I couldn't pull the symbol out of and couldn't use without being logged in.

Fscking idiots. Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

They had finally reached the point that they were an alternative to Orcad in commercial engagements, and then they gave it away in order to try to go after subscription revenue.

I literally picked up KiCad the day after I couldn't extract a symbol from an Altium library and add a couple of missing pins for a new part. I was that infuriated.

Right now, I'm evaluating KiCad 6.0 for work. I'll probably transfer over completely for personal projects (I've been doing more and more personal projects in KiCad over time with only PCB->Schematic back annotation holding me back from full transfer--that's fixed in 6.0 with the new file formats). It may take a bit, but I'll probably transfer over to KiCad for work projects that I'm the only designer on once I get a couple of projects under my belt with KiCad 6.0.

Re: Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)

#273

Post by BlueTemplar »

bsder wrote: post #237
sokoloff wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KiCAD is another package that I think is fairly competitive at this point. It’s not going to kill Altium, but it’s improved greatly in the last 3 years.

I actually disagree and think Altium will, in fact, be Victim #001 of KiCad. The question becomes: "Is Altium thousand dollars better than KiCad?" And a lot of the time the answer will now be "No." I already split my designs about 50/50 between Altium and KiCad--and that's before KiCad 6.0 which is imminent (6.0RC2 exists right now ). 1) KiCad has one killer feature: it's cross platform. I would argue that this will,…

But, in the long term,

> open a VM in the cloud and do all your work there

is something that will allow you to run any "platform" instead of being restricted to your(s) ?

Re: Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)

#274

Post by pjmlp »

chubot wrote: post #21
chrisseaton wrote: post #5

Most of these are about wanting control over the design of the software - but releasing their code doesn't have any impact on that - I don't get it? Java is open source - Oracle still tightly controls and manages the design of Java. For example 'Bad design is expensive' - how releasing your source lead to bad design? That's a complete non-sequitur.

They are arguing it does have impact on that. The company that created Java went out of business and was sold to Oracle for a fraction of its original worth. So Java was a business failure -- or at least I'd be interested to see someone defend Java as a business success. So I think it's realistic to at least engage with their argument seriously rather than dismiss it. The argument is that open source licenses are inc…

Sun went bankrupt for more than just Java, it was a complete mismanagement of everything, and they only opened up Java on the last days, until Java 6 it was pretty much only a free beer thing, no source to play around.

Additionally Java has been a major success to those that played into the ecosystem, people keep forgetting there were several (some are still around) commercial implementations of Java with features not available on the free beer JDK like AOT compilation.

The way Sun managed Solaris and SPARC hardware had more impact on their wallet than Java.

Re: Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)

#275

Post by pjmlp »

fartcannon wrote: post #99
chubot wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are arguing it does have impact on that. The company that created Java went out of business and was sold to Oracle for a fraction of its original worth. So Java was a business failure -- or at least I'd be interested to see someone defend Java as a business success. So I think it's realistic to at least engage with their argument seriously rather than dismiss it. The argument is that open source licenses are inc…

Java was killed by Microsoft using their famous Embrace, Extend And Extinguish method. It's on the wikipedia page as an example of the EEE method. The fact that Java remains at all today is a testament to the power of open sourcing something.

And ironically Google gets a free pass from SV cheering crowd for trying to do the same.

Re: Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)

#276

Post by boublepop »

VHRanger wrote: post #8

1 - 11: $$ 12. Doesn't want to show the world how bad the codebase is. Seriously, Mathematica makes naïve python code seem blazingly fast I've had the displeasure of porting 4k sloc of Mathematica to python and the script runtime went from 40min to 5sec.

Sounds like the typical case of someone not understanding Mathematica. The 40min -> 5sec speed up can typically be achieved in Mathematica just by changing 1 to 1. The default is slower but always completely accurate, which is important for math, but less so for most numerical scripts.

If that fails Mathematica can also just compile your script for you.

Re: Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)

#277

Post by dschuetz »

The only reason not to open source is monetization monopoly. Wolfram could as well be open source and still not be like all those 10 excuses they pose as arguments against open source. They just want to keep their code hidden, and not be re-applied elsewhere.

Re: Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)

#278

Post by boublepop »

nerdponx wrote: post #77
VHRanger wrote: post #8

1 - 11: $$ 12. Doesn't want to show the world how bad the codebase is. Seriously, Mathematica makes naïve python code seem blazingly fast I've had the displeasure of porting 4k sloc of Mathematica to python and the script runtime went from 40min to 5sec.

It might be a situation like the R language, where the language itself is too flexible to optimize well. Loops and function calls in R are (or were, last I checked on R 3.x) yet another order of magnitude slower than CPython. The flipside is that CPython itself has apparently gotten a lot faster in recent versions. In my unscientific homegrown testing, it beats even LuaJIT on string processing tasks.

It’s not. Mathematica is extremely flexible yes, but it’s not hindering optimization. You can literally parallelize code and compile to c automatically.

Re: Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)

#279

Post by kaetemi »

xhkkffbf wrote: post #168
jandrewrogers wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the argument is more that open sourcing adds incentives and friction that significantly increase the cost of maintaining control/alignment. Or to put it another way, maintaining good design becomes more expensive in an open source model and people respond to economic gradients, changing outcomes at the margin. I've seen this happen consistently, even when limiting "open sourcing" to throwing a tarball over th…

Yes, I've experienced this. One new CEO said he didn't want to spend the time and the money to do a good job building a great community. It was cheaper and simpler for him to focus the company's energy on their 20 big clients. This isn't true for many applications, but it is for his. And I had to agree.

Until those 20 big clients start hiring new people who don't work with that vendor's tools anymore.

Re: Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)

#280

Post by mmarq »

VHRanger wrote: post #8

1 - 11: $$ 12. Doesn't want to show the world how bad the codebase is. Seriously, Mathematica makes naïve python code seem blazingly fast I've had the displeasure of porting 4k sloc of Mathematica to python and the script runtime went from 40min to 5sec.

I'm not saying that's your case, but this reminds me of a colleague of mine who was tasked with building a piece of code to calculate some metric related to the adjacency of faulty parts in a production batch.

He initially wrote an R script, but was extremely slow, so he started rewriting it in C. When I got involved, I found he was calculating this metric with N nested loops, rather than transforming his problem in something that was supported by an existing library or built-in function.

Once he rearranged the problem as a matrix multiplication plus some statistical commands, the R script was faster than the C program and also more readable.

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